The Royal Books

Németh István PhD <nemeth@natarch.hu>

Magyar Országos Levéltár

Royal Books (Libri Regii) preserved at the National Archives of Hungary were so called “duplicate books” which were kept by the former Royal Chancellery. This archival material contains the copies of significant documents issued in the name of the king.

67 volumes of the Royal Books, which were kept at the Hungarian Court Chancellery, in Vienna between 1527 and 1848 (1867), record important facts of history of three and half centuries. Already at the time of origin of the books it meant an important viewpoint to prove fast and relatively simply access to these data and for this practical reason at the beginning of the 18^th century name index and register of subjects were edited to each volume in the Chancellery, and later in addition thematic indexes were compiled.

In the beginning the family and the local historians, then the social historians were keenly interested in the volumes of the Royal Books, but regrettably the traditional archival finding aids did not help properly the access to the information and the scientific processing of the data.

The four CD-ROM published from 1997 contain the abstracts and photos of 15 000 diploma.

On the up to now issued disks archival material of the first 38 volumes (from the period of 1527-1740) can be found.

We have created two databases from the material of each volume. The first one processes the most valuable information of manuscript notes. The other one, the supplementary database contains photos of the pages on which these notices can be found. This way every note can be interpreted in its own context, and so the user can look at the coloured signets and arms-illustrations, as well. It means altogether more than 11000 pages and nearly 3000 pictures.